Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital

We use binaries to mark a range of activity. But they can just as easily achieve the opposite effect, restricting our understanding of a phenomenon to its outer reaches. In our current age of extremes, desire for a “middle ground” is often dismissed as indecision, with more expressive descriptors like “variegated” derided as obtuse. This group exhibition, according to curators Caitlin Jones, Charo Neville and Melanie O’Brian, “troubles the enduring narrative binary of town and country.”

With “so-called British Columbia” as their focus, the curators have identified “Indigenous land dispossession and reclamation, capital accumulation in the form of real-estate assets, labour and technological development” as issues that, “like questions of class, freedom of movement and resource extraction,” cannot be reduced to an urban-rural dichotomy. In an effort to bring what is lost to light, they have selected work by 14 artists and collectives whose research and practice demonstrates an awareness of these issues, if not an identification with those who suffer the consequences of a landscape redrawn by market forces.

In blankets, Musqueam artists Debra, Aleen and Isaiah Sparrow offer two Salish weavings— one a mass-produced export (2024), the other for family use (2023). Artists Tiziana La Melia and Rodney Graham, both of whom grew up in agricultural communities, draw on literary conceptions of town mouse/country mouse and the double binary of cosmopolitan artist/rural crafter, respectively. The text-heavy Not for Sale! (2023), by Architects Against Housing Alienation, presents “achievable policy alternatives and ways of reframing that could ameliorate the current critical housing crisis across Canada.” Also included in this multimedia show are works by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Karin Jones, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Alex Morrison, Janet Wang, Holly Ward, Tania Willard and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun.

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